For the Love of Beauty

Art History and the Moral Foundations of Aesthetic Judgment

Arthur Pontynen, Michael Charlton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138510104
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351519632
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

For most of the last century the methodology of art history has followed a positivist approach, emphasizing form and style, fact and history as the means of studying works of art. By contrast the philosophical pursuit of truth, once central to the fine arts and humanities has largely been abandoned. In For The Love of Beauty, Arthur Pontynen offers a searching and ambitious critique of modern aesthetic practice that aims to restore the pursuit of the knowledge of reality--Being--to its rightful place.Pontynen begins by addressing the question of why the pursuit of truth (be it called Dao, Dharma, God, Logos, Ideal, etc.) is no longer acceptable in academic circles even though it has been intrinsic to the purpose of art at most times and in most cultures. Lacking the pursuit of truth, of some degree of knowledge of what is true and good, the humanities necessarily lack intellectual and cultural grounding and purpose. Fields of study such as philosophy, music, art, and history are therefore trivialized and brutalized. Pontynen's focus on the study of the visual arts details the how the denial of purpose and quality in modernist and postmodernist aesthetics has denied art any possibility of transcending entertainment, therapy, or propaganda.In place of the established narratives, Pontynen offers a counter-narrative based on a cross-cultural pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. He recognizes that substantively different cultural traditions exist and that the truth claims of each may be valid in whole or in part. He shows how the history of art parallels the intellectual history of Western culture and how these parallels affect both aesthetics and ethics. Pontynen engages with those elements of modernist and postmodernist thought that might be true. His purpose is not simply to deny their validity but to engage a viewpoint that does not privilege the notion of a purposeless cosmos. For the Love of Beauty will be of interest

1
Introduction

The painting Dante and Virgil in Hell by Eugène Delacroix was exhibited in the French Salon of 1822. The painting attracted widespread and notorious attention. Some viewed it as a great advance in Western culture, whereas others viewed it as marking an ominous decline. The question of whether it marks an advance or a decline remains significant to the present. It is a question that centers on the issue of beauty.

1 Delacroix, Dante and Virgil in Hell

The theme of the painting is literary, drawn from Dante’s great fourteenth-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy. More than literary, it is indeed a metaphysical exposition. It is concerned with presenting an understanding of reality and life. The story begins a week before Easter in the year 1300. Dante is depicted lost in a forest, threatened by a wolf, a lion, and a leopard. The forest represents the tangle of worldly cares, and the animals represent respectively greed, pride, and lust. The ancient Roman poet Virgil appears as a servant of the Blessed Virgin (Divine Mercy), St. Lucy (Grace), and Beatrice. A contemporary of Dante, Beatrice died at the age of twenty-five; it was she whom Dante loved, and it was her untimely death that Dante mourned.

According to the story, Virgil, as the personification of philosophy, has been instructed to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory in his ascent to the spiritual realm where now dwells Beatrice. It is Beatrice who brings him to the gates of paradise where, having been denied happiness in the world, he seeks unification with the Divine happiness that transcends the world.

The Divine Comedy is widely recognized as a superb literary presentation of the beliefs of traditional Western culture. The conclusion of the book is expressed in its last lines: the realization that it is Divine Love that makes the world go round. The world rightly has meaning; it is informed by both Truth and Love and therefore is beautiful. But the world is also affected by the reality of freedom. Freedom makes possible the pursuit of what is true and good and it is love that inspires us to do so. Therefore, freedom is realized by loving God. But it is misused freedom that results in the pursuit of foolishness —or worse. As Augustine (354-430 AD), a primary influence on Dante, had earlier explained: misused freedom is love misplaced, and when love is misplaced, terrible consequences result.

Dante’s book presents an understanding of the world that is hierarchical and qualitative, and of life that is informed by responsible freedom. It is intellectually and culturally associated not only with the Augustinian tradition, but also with Scholasticism. It concludes that we must strive to rise above the folly of this imperfect world to obtain a glimpse of reality in all of its truth and goodness. We strive to obtain a glimpse of beauty; becoming seeks being. That striving occurs in this world as a matter of time and degree, but the goal remains transcendently constant and divine. It is a beatific vision that is pursued.

Delacroix’s painting depicts Dante crossing the river Styx with Virgil, who initially guides him during his ascending journey from Hell to Purgatory, eventually reaching the realm of Truth and Love, of being. The boat in which stand Dante and Virgil is surrounded by the damned, by those who are condemned to suffer the consequences of their own misused freedom and misplaced passions. In terrible suffering they surround the boat in their agony.

What then did some of Delacroix’s contemporaries find so disturbing about his painting? Those who agree with Dante’s explanation of reality and life find little comfort in Delacroix’s work. Delacroix selected a traditional theme with a moral and spiritual content, but then includes discordant notes in it. To the viewer’s right in the painting is Phlegyas, the boatman, attempting to steer the craft to the far shore. But to a person familiar with ancient art, his torso is a duplication of the famous sculptural fragment from the Hellenistic period, the Belvedere Torso. That torso is not recognizable as having any connection to Dante or Virgil or the pursuit of Truth and Love and Beauty. It was readily recognizable however as part of the collection of the Vatican Museum in Rome. The use of the Belvedere Torso in this painting is clearly out of context; it lurches us out of the realm of allegory and metaphysics, into one that is aesthetic and historicist. It is aesthetic in that it appeals merely to the emotions; it is historicist in that it offers no vital and enduring positive ideals.

The Belvedere Torso is recognized as an aesthetic object dating to a particular time and place. Its inclusion thereby changes this painting from a metaphysical and moral drama to an artificial aesthetic construct. No longer is the painting a window by which to obtain a glimpse of a timeless moral and spiritual realm. It is a constructed composition of artistic imagery that suits the whims and experiences of the artist, offering its viewers a temporal, nostalgic, aesthetic voyeurism.

To drive home this point, it is significant to note that Delacroix famously altered the painting by applying some dabs of pure color on the torso of one of the damned. The application of primary pigments to the work is significant. It indicates a shift from the idea that a painting or a literary work attempts to explain the purpose of reality and life. The application of primary colors on this canvas emphasizes that this object is just that—an object on which paint is applied. It is not metaphysical, it is physical, its meaning is not perennially valid, but at best temporal; it is not explanatory, it is factual and emotional. It is aesthetic.

Aesthetics emphasizes feelings, as does the nineteenth-century tradition Romanticism. Delacroix was a Romantic—and so too was Dante, of a sort. Instructive is how they differ in their understanding of love, and history. The Divine Comedy makes clear that truth and love actually do make the world go round. By that is meant that Love is ontological, and has an intellectual and qualitative as well as emotional content. It offers the belief that eternal Truth, Goodness, and Love can be pursued; as Augustine explained, just as a song is first learned then sung, love is first understood and then lived. In both art and life, purpose is recognized to exist and is then pursued; that pursuit is literally for the love of beauty. It is a pursuit (becoming) that cannot merely be temporal and emotional; it must involve ontological truth and love (being). It cannot merely be aesthetic and historicist; it involves a temporal manifestation of the eternal, a reconciling of the contingent with the purposeful. When the contingent is dedicated to the trivial or brutal, it is understood to be misplaced love. Indeed, misplaced love evidences our ability to misuse freedom. The result of such misuse is to live out of sync with a beautiful reality; it is to exist in the realm of the damned.

What then of Delacroix? To the point, Delacroix’s painting was condemned by some for its overt emotionalism. As a contemporary of Beethoven,¹ Delacroix contributed to and was influenced by the nineteenth-century artistic phenomenon known as Romanticism. He once declared that color is painting, and emotion rather than intellect is supreme. He departs from the company of Dante by asserting a diminution of intellect, where reason is subservient to or a mask for emotion. Reason is traditionally recognized as a means of attempting to understand reality (being) and life (becoming); for Dante reason combines with love when we seek contact with a purposeful cosmos. But when reason is reduced to a matter of aesthetics, then it is reduced to mere rationalization—or experience—where we boldly justify what we feel, desire, and will to be good.

This results in multiple problems for Dante, and for us. In declaring reason a mask for emotion or power, we deny Dante’s belief that reason and love are real, forming a transcendent unity worth seeking. By reducing reason to emotion, truth becomes a matter of how we feel. We thereby eliminate the space between the subject who attempts to understand, and the object to be understood. When that space between subject and object is denied, then our freedom and ability to seek understanding of reality is denied. When reality cannot be understood, then conversation in the pursuit of meaning is replaced by assertions of opinion—and power.

When the space between subject and object is denied, the notion of culture, ethics, and fine art is also denied. But it makes no sense to say that within culture (and politics) there is no space in the public realm; when knowledge is denied, then the public square is filled by skepticism, irony, and violence. As later discussed in detail, an alleged subjective-objectivity is key to Modern and Postmodern culture. Objective reality is replaced by a subjective-objectivity, in which truth, or objective being, or a transcendent God, are progressively replaced by an alleged transcendent self. But it is a chronological (kronos) rather than qualitative (kairos) progression. It marks an empty passage of time, rather than one filled with meaning.² When reality and culture are held to be the temporary products (kronos) of competing alleged transcendent selves, competing demi-gods, then public culture is reduced to violence and conflict, and thus denied.³

For example, what does Delacroix’s painting mean? Beyond the particular facts involved, the painting either means what we feel it means, or it means something as a distinct object of our consciousness. But if it means what we feel it means, if we construct its meaning, then we embrace a self-deification where truth is a matter of how we feel and rationalize. This eliminates the possibility of any degree of objective knowledge of reality since for such knowledge to be obtained, subject and object cannot be identical.⁴ If we assume that they are identical, then the object is that which we feel and construct it to be. We thereby abandon the attempt to comprehend Delacroix’s painting; beyond its basic facts, its meaning is determined by us.

This results in a type of skepticism, but not one dedicated to humility and a denial of dogma. In contrast to the skepticism of the Socratic (and Confucian) tradition, which produces the humility necessary in the attempt to understand the world and life, we have here a skepticism that denies the value of humility—or of understanding reality. Rather, it presents the dogma that truth cannot be known, only made. We thereby abandon love, which (as explained by Plato) is the desire to embrace beauty—which is the splendor of wisdom. When meaning is reduced to feeling, then a nihilistic skepticism results; love and beauty are reduced to an aesthetic pursuit of the self. As Dante observes, this path leads to the realm of the damned.

Delacroix’s approach to history was famously torn between Traditionalism and Modernism, between the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty and the aesthetic pursuit of facts and feelings. This conflict is evident in his painting Dante and Virgil in Hell. It is traditional in theme but its depiction is decisively Modernist in substance. Delacroix advances what can be termed empirical scholasticism: the mass accumulation of descriptive facts and subjective explanations.⁵ By pursuing an aesthetic vision of reality and life Delacroix contributes to the ultimate rejection of both Dante’s cultural vision and the traditional pursuit of beauty. Rejected as well is the assumption that the world and life are or can be purposeful. Instead is advocated a purposeless, aesthetic temporality where there is no space between subject and object which permits understanding, freedom, and love to occur. Instead, beyond the sphere of fact, the meaning of the painting (and of reality) is reduced to subjective coercive opinion. Knowledge of reality (being) is denied, and consequently, so too is responsible freedom (becoming). They are replaced by the will to power. Neither the fine arts nor the humanities therefore make much sense.

The central theme of this book on the history of art is that the rejection of beauty requires our embracing a subjective and therefore willful understanding of the universe and life. Either we (or Dante) really have a destination or we do not, and the Nietzschean conclusion of the aesthetic vision is the latter.⁶ The aesthetic vision thus requires us to accept the premise that life is purposeless, but for the fact of mere existence. But when existence becomes purpose then culture is indistinguishable from the mundane, the trivial, and the violent.

To accept that studying the history of art is meaningful is to rise above an existentialist aesthetic mindset. It is to accept the possibility that life ultimately is meaningful and makes sense. But it is now often taken for granted that Delacroix’s path is right: the pursuit of beauty and wisdom is no longer tenable. Such an assumption not only denies the importance of fine art and art history; it indicates a woeful provincialism by its presumption that the vast majority of fine art around the world and through time is wrong. An accurate assessment of the history of art reveals that Dante’s position is far more typical. Historically, fine art around the world and throughout time is consistently concerned not just with aesthetics, but primarily with beauty. Fine art is historically dedicated to the attempt to understand reality and life. But just as Delacroix critiques the content of The Divine Comedy, contemporary art and art history critiques most of the history of art by its rejection of the pursuit of beauty and wisdom. This is disturbing since in denying even the possibility of pursuing truth, goodness, and beauty, it typically denies both the intrinsic meaning of fine art objects, and it denies any significant reason for studying it. Indeed, an aesthetic world lacks objective meaning, and therefore limits belief to and in violence.⁷ Beyond a utilitarian or pragmatic need to be co-conspirators to gain ultimately meaningless advantage, there is scant need for culture, scholarship, or beauty, in an aesthetic and violent world. And there is certainly no ground, or space, for responsible conversation.

Should we follow Delacroix or can we emulate Dante in his quest for Beauty? As critical as these questions are to the quality of our lives, they are nonetheless obscured by the prevalence today of aesthetics. From an aesthetic viewpoint, there is no way to judge whether Delacroix or Dante is closer to the truth —because we know a priori that truth is a matter of aesthetic taste, and meaning is a matter of opinion or identity. If art is viewed aesthetically, then it is commonly viewed sociologically.⁸ If it is viewed only sociologically, then it cannot rise above the realm of willful assertion. Our willful assertions, or those of Delacroix or Dante, are then neither better nor worse.⁹ They merely exist, and the questions of right or wrong, truthful or false, beautiful or ugly, make no sense.

As evidenced by Delacroix’s painting, and by the cultural and political controversies that surround us today, the conflicts of our age typically pit traditionalism versus progressivism. Indeed, Delacroix’s painting is incoherently traditionalist and progressive; but neither traditionalism nor progressivism is today commonly dedicated to the pursuit of beauty and wisdom. Neither the conservative traditionalist nor the liberal progressive admit the possibility of obtaining a glimpse of wisdom and beauty. Their common denominator is an aesthetic vision where both tradition and innovation emanate from experience. As such, each is but a distinct type of fetish.

The crux of the matter is the participation by much of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Art History and the Cultural Amnesia of Modernism and Postmodernism
• 3 Classicism: The Nature of Beauty, the Fragility of Goodness
• 4 The Laocoön: The Challenge of Tragedy and the Metaphysics of Plotinus
• 5 The Judeo-Christian Tradition: Aesthetics and Beauty Reconciled
• 6 The Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque: From a Quantative to a Quantative Universe
• 7 The Modernist-Postmodernist Tradition: The Subjective-Objectivity of the “Enlightenment” and the Decline of Beauty
• 8 Ways of Worldmaking: Nietzsche’s Rebirth of Tragedy
• 9 Western Culture at the Crossroads: The History of Art and the Postmodern Eschaton
• 10 Conclusion: Subject, Object and Responsible Freedom in the Pursuit of Beauty
• Bibliography
• Index